Cured Pink – Cured Pink 2012 (CD-R)

This CD-R was released through Breakdance the Dawn, so don’t expect much in the way of solid facts regarding this missive. Here’s what I’ve got though: on this album the Brisbane group consists of Andrew McLlellan, Glen Schenau and Mitchell Perkins, though Cured Pink is very much McLlellan’s beast. Schenau and Perkins recently got busted trespassing in some condemned Brisbane building, ostensibly on “Cured Pink duties”, so we’re dealing with probably the only QLD noise band to ever get a write up in the Courier Mail.

There are seven tracks here, and all are the sonic equivalent of a violently rubbed scab. Red and black, with bits of yellow. It shares very little in common with the also self-titled Sabbatical cassette from a couple of years ago, this being wilfully lo-fi and very looosely delivered rock, versus that release’s more industrial leanings. The record at hand plods in a suggestively violent manner, like some glassed and livid sociopath, with echoed vocals delivered like threats from the other side of some nightmarish parking lot or RSL.

Take ‘Track 3’ for instance (there are no song titles), which maintains a fairly steady tempo but is delivered in such a militantly uptight manner that it sounds more like a machine efficiently chugging than a band playing. On the other hand, ‘Track 6’ is a lagging, almost blue-sy lurch through a glass and blood strewn hut somewhere in the sticks, offering absolutely nothing in the way of exuberance or joy, but sounding at least remotely human.

Minor points of difference aside, Cured Pink is marked mainly by tension. There’s an almost overbearing sense of downtrodden masculinity about it: welling up, heavy veined, locked grimaces. It sounds constantly on the brink of being properly fucked. You can’t really ask for much more than that.